Man needs help saving historic ship

Peter Stoudt is passionate about saving a little piece of Jacksonville's history.

Which seems a little odd at first, since Stoudt, a former dean at the University of Virginia, doesn't live in Jacksonville and never has.

But the Charlottesville, Va., resident, currently at work on a book about World War II, is president of the Victory Conservancy, a non-profit organization "working to preserve the significant historical resources of the great conflicts of the 20th Century."

Stoudt considers one of those significant historical resources to be the S.S. Arthur M. Huddell. Which is where Jacksonville comes in.

In the fall of 1941, with war imminent, the United States launched an emergency shipbuilding program to boost its merchant marine fleet. Eventually, more than 2,700 of the ships, dubbed Liberty ships, were built; 82 of them were built at the St. Johns River Shipyards in downtown Jacksonville.

A placard in the Jacksonville Maritime Museum says that all 82 Jacksonville-built Liberty ships are gone now. Mary Graliker, administrative manager of the museum, said she was aware of only two surviving Liberty ships in America, the Jeremiah O'Brien in San Francisco and the John W. Brown in Baltimore. Both have been turned into operational museums. The John W. Brown is scheduled to visit Jacksonville June 4-10.

But Stoudt says there is one other surviving Liberty ship, the Huddell, currently berthed in the James River in Virginia and scheduled to be scrapped soon. Stoudt would like to see the Huddell, which he said is as rare and significant as a "Civil War Monitor," saved and turned into a museum, like the Brown and the O'Brien. The logical place for that to happen, he said, is Jacksonville, where the ship was built between Oct. 25 and Dec. 7, 1943.

Stoudt said he has the expertise to mount a preservation campaign. But he said he needs help from someone in Jacksonville. The effort to raise the $2 million needed to bring the Huddell to Jacksonville and restore it needs local leadership, he said.

Curious to see if anyone here might be interested, I talked to Mike Miller, currently the mayor's liaison to City Council. In 1994-95, while at WOKV (690 AM), Miller spearheaded an attempt to secure the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier with a long association with Jacksonville, and turn it into a floating museum.

That effort generated a lot of support but ultimately failed. The big drawback, Miller said, wasn't energy or money but the question of where to put the Sara, an enormous ship that would have dominated the skyline wherever it went. But, Stoudt noted, at 441 feet, the much smaller Huddell would have easily fit onto the Sara's flight deck.

When I told Graliker about Stoudt's ambitious plan, she was enthusiastic. "That would be a dream," she said. "It's a shame that there's no sign in Jacksonville of our maritime history."

But she said that the Maritime Museum is a shoestring operation and it would be unlikely that the museum's membership could spearhead a preservation effort.

Miller said he isn't sure the grass-roots support that existed for saving the Sara could be found for the Huddell. "It would be difficult to create the kind of passion for a ship whose only association is that it was built here," he said.

But Stoudt believes the possibility is at least worth talking about. Anyone who would like to contact Stoudt can call e-mail him at ps@cstone.net or call him at (434) 977-5897.

Charlie Patton's column appears on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Contact him at cpatton@jacksonville.com or (904) 359-4413.